Was it the literary form that he wished to criticise, or the substance? In either case I hoped he would speak with all frankness, an encouragement which Mr. Higginbotham perhaps hardly needed. “Well, I don't know anything about literature, for I thank God that my Bible and the _Pilgrim's Progress_ are enough for me; but I did once read Scott--long ago before I knew the value of time--and your book is certainly not up to that sample.” This, I assured Elijah, was my own fixed and unalterable opinion, and I ventured to congratulate Elijah on the acuteness of his literary judgment--which compliment was passed over without acknowledgment--and then I pressed for his farther criticism. “What I have to say is just this, that there are characters in the book who ought not to be introduced to a Christian family, and views which are sure to injure religion.” Now it happened that I had been reading that morning an interesting and very caustic review, in which it was pointed out that no people had ever lived or ever would live so good as the inhabitants of Drumtochty: that I had confused together the (mythical) garden of Eden with a Scots village; that the places were really very different in morals and general environment; that it was a pity that the author did not know the limits of true art; that what was wanted was reality, not sentimental twaddle, and that in short--but this is not how the critic put it--let the writer of fiction stick to the ash-pit in a house, and not attempt the picture gallery. The critic--a young gentleman, I should say--was very severe on my London doctor, who had taken a servant girl to his own house that she might die there in peace, and assured me that such extravagant unrealities showed my hopeless ignorance, and proved my unfitness to be an artist in life. Up to this point I had been much humbled, and had been trying to profit by every word of wisdom; but now I laid down the paper and had a few moments of sinless enjoyment, for this incident had been lifted bodily out of life, with only some change in names, and was the only fact in the book. A poor puling idealist!--yet even in my most foolish flights I had kept some hold on life--but here was Elijah Higginbotham sitting calmly in my study and suggesting that I was a realist of such a pronounced and shameless character that my books were not fit for family reading. When I pressed him for some evidence of his charge, he cited “Posty,” and spoke briefly but strongly about that unfortunate man's taste for alcoholic liquors. “Could I reconcile it with my conscience to introduce such a man to the Christian public, and was I not aware of the injury which drink was doing in our country?”